The most common viruses in your body don’t make you ill. Instead, they infect the legions of microbes that live in your gut. These bacteriophages, or phages for short, number in their trillions. And the most common of them might be a newly discovered virus called crAssphage.

No one has seen crAssphage under the microscope, but we know what its genome looks like—Bas Dutilh from Radboud University Medical Centre pieced it together using fragments of DNA from the stools of 12 individuals. He found crAssphage in all of them. Then, he found it in hundreds more.

To study the microbes that live in a person’s guts, scientists will typically collect a stool sample, break all the DNA within into small fragments, and sequence these pieces. The result is a metagenome: a mish-mashed collection of DNA from all the local bacteria, viruses and other microbes.

Dutilh’s team, led by Rob Edwards at San Diego State University, analysed 466 metagenomes that have been added to public databases and found crAssphage in three-quarters of them. It’s there in stool samples from people in the USA, Europe and South Korea. It actually accounted for 1.7 percent of all the sequences that the team analysed—six times more than all the other known phages put together. You probably have it inside you right now.

The work highlights just how much we don’t know about the viruses in our guts and “what exciting times these are for viral discovery”, says Lesley Ogilvie from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.

But how could such a common virus go undiscovered for so long, especially considering how popular the study of gut microbes has become? It’s as if zookeepers suddenly realised that most of their zoos contain a giant grey animal with tusks and a trunk, which no one had noticed before.

For one thing, the viruses in our guts are hard to study. “To study a virus, normally you have to make heaps of it, which isn’t possible if you can’t grow the host,” says Martha Clokiefrom the University of Leicester.And since mostgut bacteria won’t grow easily in a lab, the viruses that infect them are similarly hard to rear.

The alternative is to use metagenomics to analyse a microbe’s genes without having to grow it. But first, you have to assemble your mish-mash of sequences, which come from different organisms, into a complete genome. It’s a bit like putting all the pieces of a thousand jigsaw puzzles into one bag, and trying to solve just one.

The usual strategy is to work off what you know by aligning these new sequences to those in databases. But this approach doesn’t work very well for our inner viruses because most of them are unknown. The sequences in the databases represent the tip of the iceberg. According to Dutilh, around 75 percent of the DNA from any new stool sample—and as much as 99 percent—won’t match any of these known sequences.

So what’s in that other 75 percent?

Well, crAssphage for starters.

Dutilh’s team found it by using a different approach based on a simple idea: that fragments which repeatedly turn up in the same samples are more likely to be parts of the same genome. They used a technique called cross-assembly to identify one such group of co-occurring sequences, in stool samples from 12 people. They then assembled these sequences into a single genome.

The genome had several distinctive features which told the researchers that it belonged to a phage, albeit one that’s very different to any we currently know of. They called it crAssphage after the cross-assembly method that revealed its existence.

They used the same technique to work out what the virus infects: if there’s lots of crAssphage DNA in a sample, there should also be lots of DNA from its host. Based on this logic, the most likely hosts are a group of bacteria called Bacteroides.

The team checked this result with a second technique. They looked at CRISPR sequences—a kind of bacterial immune system that recognises DNA from infecting phages. The team scanned all known bacterial genomes for CRISPR sequences that matched crAssphage and found that the closest matches came from two groups of gut bacteria, one of which was Bacteroides.

Bacteroides are major players in our guts. They help us break down our food, control the development of our immune system, and protect us from disease-causing bacteria. Their numbers change depending on the food we eat, and they correlate with our risk of different diseases. If crAssphage infects these microbes, it could also be an important player in our daily dramas.

It’s too early to speculate what its role might be, says Dutihl. Still, we know that phages are generally important. By killing off the most abundant bacteria in the gut, they ensure that no single species can monopolise the space. And last year, Jeremy Barr, who was involved of this new study, showed that phages could even act as part of our own immune system.

Many scientists had assumed that viruses in the gut are caught up in fast-paced evolutionary battles with local bacteria. This leaves people with very different collections, and explains why most of the viral sequences that we find don’t match anything in the databases. But the existence of crAssphage challenges this concept: it was part of the pool of unknowns but it’s also incredibly common. “It definitely changes the idea we had about viruses being very individual-specific,” says Dutihl. The study of human gut bacteria followed a similar path: early studies highlighted the differences between us but important similarities started emerging as our techniques became more sophisticated.

There are probably many more common viruses waiting to be discovered. “The biggest contribution of this work is the method they used,” says David Pride from the University of California, San Diego. “It provides a blueprint for further viral discovery.”

“What are we missing when we are unable to classify a sequence? What do we do with all of the sequence reads that we can’t classify? These are tough questions that we’ve been thinking about for years,” says Kristine Wylie from Washington University in St Louis. “This paper demonstrates that the community is developing clever approaches that can be used to mine those data.”

How do they know that the sequences they’ve put together for the ass phage are genuinely from a single genome rather than just a bunch of pieces from different jigsaws which happen to look like they might fit together?

I’m not very convinced, if there are multiple viruses that live in a person’s guts, this could also lead to the conclusion that:
“It’s as if zookeepers suddenly realised that most of their zoos contain a giant black and white striped animal with tusks, a trunk with a very long neck, which no one had noticed before.” Lets call it a zegiraphant.

So they live in our gut..directing traffic…modern diets dump
gut toxins into their systems that destroy morph and
challenge viruses…what these viruses control and the mechanisms they use to instruct and communucate may be a key to many illnesses. Down the road can we use these viruses to boost immune systems and battle disease by giving instructions to them or read them to detect disease? Are we born with these viruses in tact and destroy and mutate them as we age? Are newborn gut viruses designed to allow us to live on this planet with millions of attacking viruses? Are wild aninarks carrying gut viruses to help them fight disease? Do these viruses have a life expectancy? Love your work.

You’re not likely to get a zagiraphant because the jigsaw puzzle analogy isn’t very good. It more like reconstructing a book from a bazillion random overlapped fragments from a bazillion copies of the same book. If we were talking sentence fragments, then you’d likely get zagiraphants. But if we were talking paragraph fragments or page fragments, you’d most likely get separate zebras, giraffes and elephants. The fact is we’re talking about 200 base-pair reads at minimum, so much more like making a complete book out of paragraph fragments. Also, phage genomes are circular, so you’d know when you closed the circle with your overlapped fragments and had a complete genome. Lastly, phage genomes are under evolutionary pressure to be compact and non-redundant, further maximizing your chances of identifying a complete real genome from partial reads.

“It’s as if zookeepers suddenly realized that most of their zoos contain a . . .” bunch of rats hiding under the trash bins and in the trees and in holes under the bushes . . . It wasn’t like they found something the size of a golf ball that had been overlooked. Phages are very easy to overlook. I’d expect overlookage.

What is no beginning to be understood is that your body is not your body, but a somewhat abstracted component of the vast ecological system we call the biosphere (and perhaps also part of a vast system of consciousness of existence itself). This is a bit like a pool of water in a swamp becoming self-conscious and saying ‘Hello, my name is Splashy, and I’m an individual being’.

We can say we are subsystems within more complex systems, and systems comprising many less complex subsystems, and yet it is also a continuum, with identities quite relative, overlapping, and fluid. Try thinking straight when your gut goes out of whack or the temperature rises to 105 deg. F. and you discover just how dependent your mind is on everything else.

About Ed Yong

Ed Yong is a staff science writer at The Atlantic. His work has appeared in Wired, the New York Times, Nature, the BBC, New Scientist, Scientific American, the Guardian, the Times, and more. His first book I CONTAIN MULTITUDES—about how microbes influence the lives of every animal, from humans to squid to wasps—will be published in 2016 by Ecco (HarperCollins; USA) and Bodley Head (Random House; UK).

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